Incentive award programs have been developed in a variety of industries to promote customer loyalty. Generally, such programs reward customers for repeat business with the same merchant or service provider by accumulating reward points which can then be redeemed in a plurality of ways, including exchanging the reward points for additional goods and services that may be selected from an approved list or a redemption catalog for example. The reward points are usually calculated using a predetermined formula or ratio that relates a customer's purchase volume (i.e., in terms of money value or some other volume parameter) to a certain number of reward points. For example, reward points may be issued on a one-for-one basis with each dollar that a customer spends on particular goods and services.
One well-known example of a customer incentive program is a “frequent flyer” program which rewards airlines passengers with “mileage points” based upon the distances that the passengers fly with a particular airline. The mileage points may then be redeemed for free airfare or free car rentals. Other incentive award programs are designed to induce usage of particular financial instruments, such as credit cards or debit cards, by accumulating reward points or dollar value points based upon the volume of purchases made using the particular financial instrument. These types of programs may be designed such that customers of the financial institution accumulate reward points which can be redeemed for selected goods or services or, alternatively, such that customers accumulate points which have a dollar value which can be applied toward a credit or debit balance, depending on whether the instrument is a credit or debit instrument, for example.
These and other similar incentive award programs are described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,774,870 and 6,009,412, issued to Thomas W. Storey and assigned to Netcentives, Inc., both of which are hereby incorporated by reference to the extent that they describe an automated rewards system. For more information on loyalty systems, transaction systems, electronic commerce systems, and digital wallet systems, see, for example, the Shop AMEX™ system as disclosed in Ser. No. 60/230,190 filed Sep. 5, 2000; the MR as Currency™ and Loyalty Rewards Systems as disclosed in Ser. No. 60/197,296 filed on Apr. 14, 2000, Ser. No. 60/200,492 filed Apr. 28, 2000, and Ser. No. 60/201,114 filed May 2, 2000; a digital wallet system as disclosed in U.S. Ser. No. 09/652,899 filed Aug. 31, 2000; a stored value card as disclosed in Ser. No. 09/241,188 filed on Feb. 1, 1999; a system for facilitating transactions using secondary transaction numbers as disclosed in Ser. No. 09/800,461 filed on Mar. 7, 2001; and also in related provisional applications Ser. No. 60/187,620 filed Mar. 7, 2000, Ser. No. 60/200,625 filed Apr. 28, 2000, and Ser. No. 60/213,323 filed May 22, 2000, all of which are herein incorporated by reference. Other examples of online membership reward systems are disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,774,870, issued on Jun. 30, 1998, and U.S. Pat. No. 6,009,412, issued on Dec. 29, 1999, both of which are hereby incorporated by reference. A further example of a loyalty and reward program may be found at the AIR MILES® Web site (www.airmiles.ca), which describes a loyalty program offered by The Loyalty Group, a privately held division of Alliance Data Systems of Dallas, Tex., and which is hereby incorporated by reference. Additional information relating to smart card and smart card reader payment technology is disclosed in Ser. No. 60/232,040, filed on Sep. 12, 2000, and U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,742,845; 5,898,838 and 5,905,908, owned by Datascape; all of which are hereby incorporated by reference. Information on point-of-sale systems and the exploitation of point-of-sale data is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,832,457, issued on Nov. 3, 1998 to O'Brien et al., which is hereby incorporated by reference.
To promote loyalty to a particular company, many of the above-described loyalty programs are sponsored by and operated by a company such that the consumers are typically required to earn and burn the loyalty points through the same company. As such, a particular sponsoring company may market its own loyalty points under a particular trademark (e.g., Membership Rewards sponsored by American Express, DeltaMiles sponsored by Delta Airlines, Hilton Rewards sponsored by Hilton Hotels, ePloids sponsored by Frito-Lay and FlightFund sponsored by AmericaWest Airlines) and maintain loyalty point accounts for each consumer, wherein the accounts include only loyalty points associated with the sponsoring company. Accordingly, the consumers in the sponsoring company loyalty program typically earn loyalty points from the sponsoring company, then the consumers spend the sponsored loyalty points on reward items offered by the sponsoring company.
However, it is often difficult for an individual sponsoring company to offer a sufficiently wide range of reward items to satisfy the varied interests of its consumers. Moreover, many of the consumers may only engage in a limited amount of business with the particular sponsoring company and/or may only earn a limited amount of sponsored loyalty points from the sponsoring company. As such, a consumer's loyalty point account with the sponsoring company may include a minimal amount of loyalty points and the minimal point balance may be insufficient to obtain any desired reward item. Additionally, even if a consumer obtains a sufficient point balance with a particular sponsoring company, the consumer may not be interested in redeeming the points for any of the limited reward items offered by the company, the consumer may forget or ignore the existence of the point balance and/or the consumer may not desire to spend the time reviewing the reward items or completing the redemption information. In these exemplary situations, the loyalty point account may only be rarely used or may remain inactive.
The sponsoring company often maintains hundreds or thousands of loyalty point accounts for current and past consumers; however, possible public relations, marketing and legal implications exist with a sponsoring company simply canceling certain loyalty point accounts or setting expiration dates on points. As such, the sponsoring company usually continues to maintain the rarely used or inactive loyalty point accounts. However, accounting and legal guidelines typically require a sponsoring company to include all of the loyalty point balances, including balances from the rarely used loyalty point accounts, as liabilities on its accounting statements. As such, a need exists for a system and method for reducing or eliminating certain loyalty account balances and providing certain consumers with new ways to aggregate and redeem loyalty point balances.
Furthermore, portions of each of the above-described programs may be used to induce customer loyalty to particular merchants or service providers who directly provide goods or services to the consumer. In other words, these prior art frequency awards programs provide a means for retail businesses, financial institutions, and others in direct contact with the customers they service to provide incentives to their customers to encourage repeat and/or volume business. However, these programs do not sufficiently address the similar needs of businesses that are further up in the distribution chain, such as manufacturers, to promote volume purchases by customers based upon, for example, brand loyalty independent of the retail source for the purchase. Additionally, the prior art programs do not provide a means for monitoring, tracking, and/or analyzing consumer and product data across distribution channels for a particular manufacturer and/or the variety of goods which that manufacturer places into the stream of commerce for ultimate sale to consumers by a retailer.
Generally, before a product arrives at a retail establishment for sale to a consumer, the product travels through a distribution chain which originates with the manufacturer. The manufacturer typically sells its products to a wholesaler who in turn sells those products to various retailers. Most modern retailers implement some form of computerization or electronic technology in their day-to-day operations. This technology typically consists of using point-of-sale (POS) systems for automating checkout procedures, assisting sales personnel, and the like. POS systems generally include one or more automated check-out terminals which are capable of inputting or sensing and interpreting a symbol or other indicia related to the product, such as a Universal Product Code (UPC), generally comprising a machine-readable bar code coupled with a human-readable UPC number, that is printed on a label or tag which is placed on each item of merchandise to be purchased. The manufacturer may assign and mark each product that it sells with a UPC. Conventionally, once the product reaches the retailer, the retailer further identifies each product with a Stock Keeping Unit (SKU) number or code as well as other information for identifying a specific item or style of merchandise. The retailer's SKU number may be either an entirely different number used to identify each product (e.g., by style) or a modified version of the manufacturer's UPC number, derived, perhaps, by adding a SKU number to the UPC number for example.
A POS terminal, a kiosk terminal, or a sales person's hand-held terminal might be coupled to a store computer system, such as a network server or some other store platform host, which is able to recognize and process UPC and/or SKU information which has been manually keyed-in or sensed and interpreted by a device, such as a barcode reader, coupled to the terminal. The computer system typically includes a database which stores information relating to the retailer's product inventory, such as stocked merchandise, a UPC and/or SKU number for each item of merchandise, and various types of merchandise identification information, such as price, inventory, style, color, size, etc., which is associated with each UPC and/or SKU number. When a customer purchases an item of merchandise, store personnel frequently use an automated terminal to read the barcode markings which are attached to the item. A computer interprets the UPC and/or SKU number comprised by the barcode, accesses the database to determine the price for each item, and maintains a running total of the total transaction price.
One problem that results from the independent identification schemes of the manufacturer and the retailers is that there is no way for the manufacturer to track the quantity of any particular product that each retailer sold. For example, even if a manufacturer obtains all of the SKU numbers representing items purchased from Retailer 1 and Retailer 2 by consumers, the manufacturer has no means for determining which SKU number corresponds to the manufacturer's UPC, since the UPC's and SKU numbers of the various retailers are not tracked and matched.
In view of the foregoing, a need exists for an incentive or loyalty program which overcomes the shortcomings of the prior art. Thus, there is a need for a system and method which provides a universal customer incentive program that networks various levels of the product distribution chain, such as manufacturers, wholesalers, and retailers, to provide incentives to consumers to purchase products not only from a particular merchant or group of merchants but also from particular manufacturers, regardless of the specific merchant who sells the manufacturer's products to the consumer. Additionally, a need exists for a system and method for gathering data which associates particular consumer purchasing behaviors and specific products or product criteria across a manufacturer's distribution channels.